Journal

This is a film recording of a personal experience, and is a documentation of a real moment. This actually happened. I am in this moment. I remember being in the moment. And at the time also consciously outside the moment.

The film’s subject, treatment, and content contain clichés designed to promote familiarity in the mind of the viewer. By working with everyday prosaic moments, such as in this example, the artist shares his experience of mentally ‘standing-aside’ , or ‘stepping-outside’ from his own everyday experiences. Brechtian, distanciation effects are used in this mode of presentation to make the familiar seem strange, and raise questions in the mind of the observer.

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Towards the end of the film, the older child exits the frame on the right hand side, disappearing from view, while the camera moves to the left, be fore the image fades out to white. The film draws on familiar visual metaphors such as following the characters on their journey, the setting sun and cinematic tropes such as slow-motion and visual fade out to suggest time, knowledge and experience passing between generations and siblings and therefore mortality. The tilted camera angle, hallucinogenic visual effect and off-kilter audio, contribute to a sense of unease and melancholy which is reinforced by the decaying soundtrack. Secondary narratives are also evident such as a fear of the unknown, concerns for, and about the future - particularly perhaps those felt by the father. Impending disaster, even a suggestion of nuclear apocalypse, is implied by the saturated colour and the visual fade out which obliterates the landscape.

Excerpts from film transcript Journal, 2018

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Journal is a dream-like video sequence repeated on a loop. The work examines a moment of conscious detachment made apparent through the intrusion of the digital world into daily life felt when recording a home movie. The installation features three different computer generated voices narrating accounts of the production process, deconstructing the procedures used to make the work.

2 channel video projection (recorded video and live feed), 2 x stereo sound, 2.50 mins, 2018

Still from film Journal, 2018